In between swilling citrusy beers and fetching Gatorade for
Steve Young, the ever-lofty Peter King took a moment this week to
write about his super duper favorite sport... BASEBALL! What, you thought his favorite sport was
football? PLEASE. Behind baseball and eight grade girl's
softball and keeping the Acela quiet car quiet, Peter's sporting plate is
nearly full! Anyway, here's King
drooling out his opinion about Dan Le Batard giving away his Hall of Fame vote:

The fact is, baseball writers have a far more difficult job
that the voters for any other Hall of Fame, because they have to factor in how
to treat players from the Steroid Era, and I don't know how you do that.

By limiting the ballot to 10, it's hard to get into. Tough
choices have to be made. When a player such as Jim Ricegets
in on his 15th try, that means the voters have gone through an evolution of
more than a decade of scrutiny, comparison, soul searching, and review of his
career. It was a hard decision for most to vote Rice into the Hall of Fame...

I've been voting since 1986 and I truly miss the good old
days when we argued about home runs, batting averages, ERAs, World Series
performances, All-Star Games, and a player's dominance at his position in his
era. Things were so much simpler then. Saying yes to Ron Santo or no to Jim
Kaat was a serious baseball debate. This was before PEDs and WAR and ALDS and
Deadspin buying a Hall of Fame ballot. Now there is so much to consider, it
makes one's head explode.

Sportswriters will tell you this is a hard job, even though
voting for a Hall of Fame isn't a job at all.
Writers do the job for free and are more than happy to be paid strictly
in prestige. In fact, here is a sampling
of far more difficult jobs:

Ditch digger

Night nurse

Coal miner

Teacher

President of the United States

Firefighter

Navy SEAL

Drug runner

Last prosecutor employed by the city of Detroit

Dishwasher

Farmer

Nightclub bathroom attendant

Those are hard jobs.
Sitting in on baseball's equivalent of a Wal-Mart board meeting? THAT IS NOT HARD. That is easy.
That is a joy. Don't feed me a
line of horseshit about how AGONIZING the job is when you fucking volunteered
for it. You want that job! You love that job! If you didn't love all the PRIVILEGE it
confers upon you, you wouldn't do it!
You can sense a bit of damage control every time someone like Shank
drones on and on about tough choices.
It's basically screaming, "Don't get mad at me! I did my homework!"

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This is all horseshit.
What's really at stake when you vote for a Hall of Fame? Your vote doesn't start or end WARS. All it does is make a filthy rich, obscenely
talented athlete who has already had multiple lifetimes worth of adulation
either a little bit happier, or a little less happy. That's it.
There's more at stake in judging an amateur gymnastics meet. It's not like Jack Morris won't be able to
get into Harvard now that you failed to elect him.

No, the only reason Hall of Fame voters think this job is
hard is because of potential fan blowback.
Here's King, still mashing away at his MacBook Air keys:

I've found this over the years about being a Pro Football
Hall of Fame voter: Very few people are going to say, "You guys did a great
job." Most often, the Denver fan is going to say, "You're an idiot for not
putting Terrell Davis in the Hall of Fame," and the Packers fan is going to
scream about Jerry Kramer. It grinds on you after a while; it certainly has on
me.

In other words, the hard part about the job is dealing with
making your opinion public, which is the job that many sportswriters are
supposed to do day after day. Yes, it's
true: fans will never be happy with your votes, because fans are dicks. But none of this is of any literal
consequence to the world. Don't sit
there and earnestly tell me that this is something out of Sophie's Choice, you
fucking drama queens. Tim Raines won't
get shipped to labor camp because he didn't make your ballot. These are people who want your admiration for
putting thought and care into the process when that's what they're SUPPOSED to
do anyway, when that is the absolute least they can do. And even then, it's not hard. You do your homework. You check off some names. You put a stamp on the envelope. And the world keeps spinning. Your job is easy. Your job is fun. Don't try to sell me on it being any other
way.